NASA engineer Luke Setzer, though not a quantum physicist, formed a study group to explore Mills' work. Setzer doesn't see Mills as posing a drastic break from quantum theory.
"This notion of overturning quantum mechanics is a misnomer. I think a better term would be 'refine and revise,'" Setzer said.
"Mills' equations already agree with experimental data for the ground state and above. If the same equations predict states below the ground state, why not look? That kind of openness is how antimatter was discovered."
Douglas Osheroff, a 1996 Nobel Prize winner in physics at Stanford University, conceded that Mills "may be creating compounds with unusual properties. This is obviously a rather clever guy, and he may be onto something, but he seems to think it's more fundamental than it really is."
After glancing over BlackLight's website, Osheroff remains certain that hydrinos are a "crackpot idea."
Grounding hydrogen
Mills agrees that the ground state is a special condition, but for different reasons. He theorizes that the ground state represents the highest stable energy, or "non-radiating," state of hydrogen. In both standard quantum models and that developed by Mills, higher orbits will spontaneously fall back to the ground state and release light. And both camps agree that when hydrogen is bound into molecules it does have a lower energy level.
"Virtually nowhere on Earth is hydrogen naturally in the 'ground state.' In every molecular composition it's at a lower orbit," Mills pointed out. "All I'm saying is that it can be knocked down non-radiatively with a chemical catalyst." Mills works with primarily potassium in the laboratory, but rubidium and strontium are also options, he said.
"What these catalysts have in common is that they can absorb energy in units of 27.2 EV," he explained. "In the extreme gravitational and temperature conditions of stars, atomic hydrogen is concentrated such that two atoms can serve as the catalyst because the combination ionizes with the acceptance of 27.2 EV from a third."
"The energy released going from one stable state to another is more than transferred to trigger the process, and that creates either a plasma in the case of a chemical catalyst or line emissions in the case of hydrinos interacting in interstellar media," Mills said. The lower-energy hydrogen blasted out in the corona and the solar wind can catalyze each other because hydrinos can accept energy at a multiple of 27.2 EV, Mills added.
How do you solve a problem like hydrinos?
Mills wasn't seeking a new energy source when he conceived of hydrinos. He finished his coursework at Harvard Medical School a year early and took the extra time before graduating in 1986 to study electrical engineering and biotechnology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Knowledge gained there contributed to a physics-based cancer treatment he proposal in Nature in December 1988.
At the same time he investigated seeking a grant to work on a free-electron laser for the Strategic Defense Initiative. MIT electrical engineering professor Dr. Hermann Haus heard this and showed Mills a pre-publication copy of a paper demonstrating that Maxwell's equations predicted the behavior of a free-electron laser, even though Maxwell certainly didn't anticipate such a technology.
Mills said he then wondered why Maxwell's equations were so fitting to free electrons, but suddenly failed when the electrons were bound in atoms. Why did quantum theory posit that everything became non-deterministic probability functions?
"I just said, let's pretend I've never seen a hydrogen atom, and using nothing but Maxwell see how it might behave," Mills explained. Hydrogen was a natural place to start, and he followed Maxwell's free electrons through formulas until they hit a nucleus. His conclusion: Maxwell nailed it.
After toying with this new model for a while, he discovered the trap door leading to the "hydrino" state below the ground state of hydrogen, Mills explains.
These days Mills has support from professors at his undergraduate alma mater, Franklin and Marshall College, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
"I think Mills is absolutely right. I couldn't be more supportive, and there are a lot of people here who feel the same way. Dr. Park is in the middle of a revolution and doesn't know it. He makes a lot of statements that in a few years will look silly," commented Dr. John Farrell, professor of chemistry who was department chair when Mills was a student. Farrell, it should be noted, holds a sweat-equity stake in BlackLight for his aid to Mills' early research.
"It's something I could put in a vial "
But what of finding the hydrinos themselves? Unlike some other speculative quantum notions based on pure mathematics, if hydrinos exist, they'll be found in experiments high and low -- from manufactured compounds to the vast voids between stars.
Mills offers his compounds to any laboratory that wants to test them. "It's something I could put in a vial and FedEx overnight to you," he said. Naval weapons laboratories at Indian Head in Maryland and China Lake in California are currently performing such tests.
Spectral Data Services, the largest contract nuclear-magnetic-resonance laboratory in the U.S., has tested hydrino compounds. Company president Garry Turner, a physical chemist, confirmed that hydrino compounds "register a strange chemical shift. I'd have to rank it up there in the top-ten weird observations I've made in my career. It's something new and different and, well, that happens."
Farrell said he thinks a "smoking gun" to prove the hydrino theory can be found by testing compounds already in Mills' possession, and he's eager for BlackLight to make them more widely available. Of particular interest is one substance linking 16 hydrinos and another, room-temperature ferromagnetic film that doesn't contain iron, nickel or cobalt.
advertisement
